New Substance Abuse Treatment Center for Female Probationers

A longstanding lament of the corrections community in North Carolina has been the lack of a residential substance abuse treatment center for female probationers and parolees. In other words, there is no DART-Cherry for women. (DART stands for Drug Alcohol Recovery Treatment.) DART-Cherry, for those who may not know, is a 300-bed facility in Goldsboro that offers chemical dependency treatment services for probationers and for certain parolees upon their release from prison. There are two program tracks at DART-Cherry, a 28-day program and a 90-day program. A third of the beds at the facility are dedicated to the 28-day program, which is geared primarily toward impaired driving offenders. The remaining 200 beds are devoted to the 90-day program which, for Structured Sentencing purposes, is a “residential program” under G.S. 15A-1340.11(8). That means it may only be ordered as a probation condition at initial sentencing for those sentenced to intermediate punishment. It may also be added later for community-sentenced offenders once they have violated probation. G.S. 15A-1344(a). You can learn more about DART-Cherry—and many other local and state-wide community corrections programs—in the North Carolina Sentencing Commission’s outstanding annual Compendium of Community Corrections Programs, authored by David Lagos of the Commission staff. Attorneys and judges thinking about DART-Cherry placement for certain defendants might also want to review DOC’s criteria for client appropriateness for the program to make sure the defendant is eligible. Many people thought it was a shame that there was no analogous program for women—especially when DOC data show that a [...]